ClearStory Data, a company specializing in bringing business-oriented data intelligence to everyone, introduced new advancements to its Spark-native Intelligent Data Harmonization and blending capabilities that will help make users more self-reliant.

The enhancements, announced at Strata + Hadoop World in NYC, are intended to address what the company says is a broad market shift and accelerating requirement for everyday business people to be able to access and blend disparate data and be more self-reliant in reaching deeper insights.

New features include smart data matching and a visual, guided interface to make multi-source, complex dataset blending simple, fast and auditable.

Smart data matching is visible and intuitive through new Google-like visual maps that allow business users to see the specific path to holistic insights.

The new guided application interface introduces auto-alerts for inconsistencies in the data or disparate data combinations that may not blend well. Users can quickly navigate to what they want to see and explore within the harmonized data.

“We’re allowing the end users to have the visibility and control over how they want to bring these data sets together,” said Andrew Yeung, director of product marketing at ClearStory.

Other updates include access to a broad range of data and visual guidance for ad-hoc data blending and harmonization, enhanced data intelligence and smart data matching with visual cues on data blending and best matches across complex data, and new Data Lineage Visualizer to ensure integrity of data and insights.

“We’re making it easier for people with less technical skills to do this on the fly and we’re giving a lot more visibility and smartness into the whole process,” said Ali Tore, chief product officer at ClearStory. “Through deeper visibility into what and how data is being blended and harmonized, paired with more automated intelligence through smart data matching, ClearyStory’s Spark-native solution and business-friendly application makes combining data a lot easier and faster so business users can be more self-reliant.”